Last year, Independent Sector published research on how advocacy by the nonprofit sector has evolved over the last 25 years, and specifically, how it has severely declined, with only 31% of nonprofits reporting advocacy activities over the last 5 years. Compare that to the year 2000, where more than double that—74% of the nonprofit sector–was participating in advocacy activities.
That dip in advocacy has multiple rationales, including increased confusion about what counts as advocacy and experiencing “advocacy fatigue” from how long advocating can take to create long-term policy and systems change.
To better understand how collaboratives CAN participate in advocacy to support policy change and their collective goals, we talk with Arts for LA, an arts advocacy organization that supports creative arts and jobs in Los Angeles County, California. We learn about the Creative Jobs Collective Impact Initiative (CJCII), and how they have used data to strengthen their collaborative and advocacy efforts.
To learn more about how collectives can get involved in advocacy (and how to avoid or mitigate advocacy fatigue), we hear from Ricky Abilez and Gabriel Gutierrez from Arts for LA, and Adam Fowler from CVL Economics. They share what has worked, what has been challenging, and how partners with different motivations and backgrounds can still work together to achieve advocacy wins.
Ways to listen: You can listen below or on your preferred podcast streaming service, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Please find a transcript of this talk further down this page.
Resources and Footnotes
- Arts for LA
- Creative Jobs Collective Impact Initiative
- CVL Economics
- Resource – Arts for LA Campaign Center
- Webinar –Public Comment: A Webinar on Using Your Voice for Change
- Video –Creative Jobs Collective Impact Initiative (CJCII) Report about Policy Recommendation
- Report –The Retreat of Influence: Exploring the Decline of Nonprofit Advocacy and Public Engagement
- Webinar –Advocacy: What You Can and Can’t Do
More on Collective Impact
- Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
- Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact
Music
The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.
The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.
Listen to Past Episodes: You can listen and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.
The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.
In this episode, we’re exploring how collaboratives can participate in advocacy to support policy change and their collective goals. We talk with Arts for LA, an arts advocacy organization that supports creative arts and jobs in Los Angeles County, California. We learn about their advocacy work with the Creative Jobs Collective Impact Initiative and how they have used data to strengthen their collaborative and advocacy efforts.
In this discussion, we talk with Ricky Abilez and Gabriel Gutierrez from Arts for LA, and Adam Fowler from CVL Economics to learn more about how collectives can get involved in advocacy (and how one can avoid or mitigate advocacy fatigue). They also share what has worked well, what has been challenging, and how partners with different motivations and backgrounds can still work together to achieve advocacy wins.
Moderating this discussion is Collective Impact Forum Director of Programs and Partnerships Courtney W. Robertson. Let’s tune in.
Courtney W. Robertson: Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast. My name is Courtney W. Robertson, director of programs and partnerships with the Collective Impact Forum, and I am your host. In this conversation we will discuss all things policy and advocacy specifically focusing on how these two levers have been used to drive workforce and economic growth for an LA-based arts collaborative. Joining me from the organization, Arts for LA, based in Los Angeles, are Gabriel Gutierrez, program lead and operations associate, and Ricky Abilez, director of policy and advocacy. They are joined by Adam Fowler from CVL Economics, who serves as a researcher with their collaborative. Thank you all for joining me today. We’ll start by having each of you just briefly introduce yourself and tell us more about your specific role.
Gabriel Gutierrez: Hello, everyone. My name is Gabriel Gutierrez. Thank you for taking the time to listen. I am the CJCII program lead and supporting operations at Arts for LA and my role really is looking at the coordinating of the CJCII, Creative Jobs Collective Impact Initiative, and supporting our steering committee, workgroups, facilitation, all and anything that goes with a backbone organization. And I’ll pass it off to Rick.
Ricky Abilez: Hi, folks. My name is Ricky Abilez. I am the director of policy and advocacy here at Arts for LA. My pronouns are they/them, and I oversee our advocacy strategies at the local level. I engage and lobby legislators on a regular basis. That goes for city council, the County Board of Supervisors, and in some instances, even state legislators. And then I also engage our community in what we call listening sessions to help us build our policy and advocacy agenda, which we release every two years. Yeah, thank you. Happy to be here. Handing it off to Adam.
Adam Fowler: It’s great to be here with everyone. My name is Adam Fowler. I’m a labor market economist. I work at CVL Economics. We’re a Los Angeles-based consulting firm. We work at the intersection of the creative economy and issues of policy, especially around economic and workforce development. Super excited to be here and have a great conversation.
Courtney W. Robertson: A lot like the dream team. I think folks are going to get a lot out of this conversation today. I’m just thinking about even like the partners in collaboratives that we work more intimately with, I think they’re going to get a lot out of this conversation, so again, thank you all for joining us today.
Let’s start, since we’re talking about Arts for LA and the Creative Jobs Collective Impact Initiative, Gabriel, I’ll invite you in to tell us more about that work. So what is Arts for LA? What’s the work that the organization does? And then if you want to, go ahead and dive into the particular initiative that you all have going.
Gabriel Gutierrez: Of course. I’ll start with Arts for LA. So Arts for LA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and Arts for LA is LA County’s arts and culture advocacy organization. We are a network of about 75,000 arts advocates and represent nearly 200 arts and culture organizations. The work that we do can really be distilled to three words, and that’s the classic, so connect, lead, learn. For us that means on the connect side it speaks to our role as a convener for the field. We bring artists and orgs from various disciplines and sectors together. An example of that is like through our state of the arts summit every year. Learn speaks to our role in helping the field better understand itself through field surveys, unique research. And then finally, our lead function speaks to our role in offering leadership development programming for creative workers to really advocate for themselves and the field. Most of that falls under ACTIVATE programming. That’s kind of what Arts for LA does and we kind of also build relationships with elected officials and advocates across four issue areas: jobs, education, space, and money.
And I think that leads us to the CJCII. I want to just a small frameup of the collective impact initiative. The initiative really is a direct response to two years of community listening that happened between 2019 to 2022. We engaged about 1,977 artists and creative workers where the issues of the lack of workforce diversity, wages, and undercapitalization of the sector were primary concerns, and we know that all of it was exacerbated, of course, by COVID-19.
The goals of the initiative are really—we can break it down into three main goals. The first one is achieving parity between the regional demographics and creative workforce representation. The second goal is establishing a sector-wide median entry-level wage that is at or above the region’s living wage as determined by the MIT Living Wage Calculator. Right now, that’s $26 per hour in LA County for a single individual. The third goal is building 10,000 creative sector job placements centering youth and adults from historically underrepresented communities.
The people who are engaged are our 19-person steering committee. They’re a cross-sectoral representation of folks from places like the LA County Department of Arts and Culture, Department of Economic Opportunity, researchers like Adam and CVL Economics, who’s on this panel as well, around this podcast episode as well. We have folks like Dream folks from DreamWorks, IATSE Local 80, small and large nonprofits like Show Box LA and Briggs Foundation, arts workers, and K through 12 and higher education institutions. We are a very, very represented, representational amount of folks that are committed to the goals of CJCII supporting our work.
I think I will pass is on to Ricky to complete this section.
Ricky Abilez: Yeah, I’m happy to jump in. In addition to what Gabriel was sharing, I think something we realized last year with an independent sector report that was released on nonprofit advocacy is that there’s a significant decrease, only 31 percent of U.S. nonprofits engage in advocacy at all, and that’s down from 74 percent in 2000. So in 24 years it’s dropped significantly. There are many reasons as to why, but mainly, folks don’t know that they can advocate for their needs or the needs of their community. And if they do, only about 32 percent of those who do engage in advocacy know what does or does not count as lobbying. In other words, they’re afraid they might break the law.
There’s a third perceived reason at Arts for LA and that’s advocacy fatigue or disillusionment. What we hear a lot from advocates is I’ve engaged in the process before and it doesn’t work, or we got something and then it was taken away from us. For those who don’t know how state budgets work in particular, you can be told you’re going to get funding for a pilot program, and then in the May revise, the governor’s budget may revise, he might strip that funding away. So folks become fatigued by that. Why would I participate and take my time or step away from work for a day if it’s not working? We don’t just see this in the arts. We see it in politics across the nation.
So I think some of the most fascinating data that came from this report is that only one in five of nonprofits that do engage in this type of work provide information on how to vote, and nonpartisan voting information is not lobbying. That is just an exciting opportunity to get people engaged in the civic process. Additionally, even the nonprofits that do claim that they support and are dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion, only 36 percent of those nonprofits engage in policy activities that create more equitable systems.
And so with all of that data we kind of taken that at Arts for LA and we’re really trying to change it in the Los Angeles region. We mobilize community members to engage in advocacy days, both at city hall, at the County Board of Supervisors, and also in Sacramento. We encourage them to engage in policy analysis and we prepare arts advocates to participate in legislative meetings. We provide them with tools to turn their concerns into requests or their ideas into action, and that all happens through our leadership development programs known as ACTIVATE.
So we have four different types of programs. One builds advocates. One builds emerging arts leaders. The other pairs emerging leaders with mentors. That’s known as the Protégé program. Then we have a student organizing program that really dials in on high school students.
So I say all of that because the arts and culture regularly and disproportionately targeted for budget cuts because there’s this false narrative that the arts are really only entertainment, but they actually provide immense value to the overall economy and the mental and physical wellbeing of individuals. We need to change the narrative from like starving artists or arts for arts sake to the arts as civic engagement and economic development. We believe that by investing in creative workers and creative jobs like our initiative, we’re really going to achieve something special, and we know that we can’t do it alone.
Courtney W. Robertson: I have so many questions. Ricky, you’ve just sparked—both you and Gabriel sparked so many questions. But I’m curious about—because essentially what you talked about when you talked about both folks not understanding what they can do around advocacy within the nonprofit space, and then this piece around fatigue. I’m curious, what are some of the approaches you all have taken to shift mindsets around like what folks can do and then how do you support like at least trying to mitigate as much as possible the advocacy fatigue component of it?
Ricky Abilez: Yeah, I think the big thing is showing folks, giving folks examples of when advocacy does work and really elevating that. I think we so often focus on the bad things like when we are getting budget cuts we ring the alarm, but it’s just as important to reflect on the wins once they’ve occurred. I can point to a recent advocacy effort that happened with the state budget. The governor was going to cut 58 percent of arts funding in this next fiscal year. It was going to be a 10-million-dollar cut to the California Arts Council, which is the statewide agency for the arts and culture, a 12.5-million-dollar cut for a pilot program known as the Performing Arts Equitable Payroll Fund, and that’s to reimburse performing arts organizations for their payroll expenses. And then, in addition to that, he was going to move the state arts agency under economic development in his office at the state level. So really big changes while we’ve been arguing for more funding. We’re already 36th, I believe, in the nation in terms of per-capita arts spending, and a cut like that would have put us behind states like Florida. We would have fallen, I think, to 45th.
So we really mobilized advocates across the state with our partners, California Arts Advocates, Actors Equity, Theater Producers of SoCal, CVL, so many people really came together to push against this. Nine thousand letters were sent at the state level, 465 arts and cultures organizations and agencies signed on to a letter to the legislature. All 120 offices were called in one day here in Los Angeles to push against these cuts. We clawed back a lot of it. So we got five million dollars in funding back for the state arts agency. We got 12.5 million dollars back for that pilot program, and the agency is no longer going to be moved under the governor’s office. These are all changes that the state legislature proposed to the governor’s budget and we anticipate he’ll likely pass it. We don’t know for sure right now, but those are wins. Those are massive wins. It’s hard for advocates to understand that sometimes because we’re getting back what we didn’t have, or we’re getting back what was going to be taken away from us when we should be arguing for more. I think a lot of folks think that way, however, it’s important to understand that if we hadn’t advocated then we would have seen those massive cuts and we would have seen an exodus of arts nonprofits across the state. So I think that’s one piece.
The other piece I actually would love Adam to speak to because if I’ve learned anything it’s that data can be very empowering for arts advocates, especially when we understand where we fall in the nation in terms of how much we spend on the arts, and so I would love to hand it off to Adam to talk about data.
Adam Fowler: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s one of the things that excites me in my position. I think oftentimes people have some sort of economics or math phobia and they have left brain and right brain people and I think sometimes data and numbers make people fearful. We think about how it can empower things like advocacy and how pushing back on narratives with kind of empirical under sights really can help.
So I think Ricky talking about where we fall compared to in our mind where we think we fall, California being this artistic hub for the globe, a creative community globally, we think of ourselves as very progressive on all these policy issues. And then when we take a look and say what are we actually talking about and how do we rank versus some of these other states or jurisdictions we think we know about, and suddenly I think that disconnect between who we think we are and who our policy allocations or economic data or other kind of empirical realities tell us we are is super important, and I think it often gets people’s attention. If you’re a progressive legislator in the state capitol or in the supervisorial district and you think of yourself as being kind of a progressive icon and suddenly a place where you think of not being so progressive is ranked three rungs above you in terms of what they’re allocating for arts and things like that. I think sometimes that’s a really sticky message that can pay dividends over time in terms of advocacy and bringing community together.
Courtney W. Robertson: Thank you, both. Some of the things that I’ve picked up from what you both have shared is first, this sort of like the power of we, right, and demonstrating that collectively we can take action that influences and moves state legislators. To your point, Ricky, yeah, we’re fighting for something that could potentially be taken away from us and we think we should be fighting for but the fact that we were able to get them to reconsider a decision that quite frankly was probably already made shows the power of that collective, and so that sort of being your quote-unquote small win which I know it wasn’t a small feat but for folks, that opens up the opportunity that you have as a collective to really drive work and drive systems and drive change within those systems.
And then this idea of meeting the moment. Sometimes the future state of things is very important but we also have to meet the moment and what’s needed now, and to your point, well, if we get this major cut, that means so many organizations are going to be affected and in a lot of ways that affects the work that we’re able to do collectively so how do we make sure that everyone can remain at the table first so we can then move towards this other shared vision that we have. And then this piece around data driving both action and—I can’t even read my note but you said something, Adam, that I was like that is so powerful. In a sense we use this to think about action and narrative. That was the other piece I was going to point out about how do we use this data to get a sense of what’s happening, what’s not happening, what needs to be done, and then how do we use this to shape the narrative that we want to be present for our sector or for the work that we’re doing so I appreciate both of you lifting up those points because I think that’s critically important regardless of what issue a collective is focusing on, having some of those core tenets to help drive and shape the work is truly important.
I want to talk a bit about—because you all mentioned the totality of your partnership, you have a range of folks from grassroots folks it sounds like to folks from DreamWorks, which is a global organization, right? How are you all engaging so many partners in this work specifically around the policy and advocacy piece? What does that look like in terms of you gathering them? What are some of those I guess like feedback loops and opportunities that folks have to engage in this collaborative work?
Gabriel Gutierrez: Yeah, perfect. I’ll speak to that, and I keep going back to this idea of dream team, right, that you introduced, Courtney. We have a dream team on our steering committee. We have a dream team even amongst us, a researcher, policy advocacy director, myself, I have a background in grassroots organizing and a sociologist by trade but really what is important for us when we take into consideration just advocacy fatigue, how we want to engage folks, what hasn’t worked in the past and what should work right now especially when a lot of folks care about it is the opportunities.
So I can speak in the context of early on. Early on with our steering committee before bringing them on we had an early win which was a motion where we took those two years of previous listening, we put it into this motion, really set and framed it up for LA County, and we passed an initial motion. We passed a motion that was coauthored by LA County Board of Supervisors, Hilda Solis and Lindsey Horbath. This was back on April 4, 2023, that prioritized the CJCII, our initiative and our work in LA County so we set the stage early on for our steering committee, for folks across, like we said, big organizations like DreamWorks, grassroots folks, artists, culture workers, and then we just continued on that, connecting the piece on data.
In September 2023 we hosted a World Café where we’re like, hey, we have this data. Sometimes data can be impersonal so let’s try to make it personal, and we’re inviting—just cold pitching, right? Cold messages to a whole range of folks that were similar to the representation of the steering committee. I think about 200 folks were invited. We’re like we’re inviting you into the steering committee, I mean into this World Café. We’re going to be sharing qualitative data that speaks to our baseline research on 65 creative occupation profiles, and we’re going to be talking about W-2 work, 1099 contractors, and gig economy income, and that in itself was a driving point already because we were leading with authenticity. We were leading with truth and saying, hey, the sector is operating differently and we don’t have to take just the W-2 approach, just a gig approach, and we wanted to just thread that for everyone. In that inaugural World Café we had about 80 community members again that had been a part of advocacy, that had been fatigued, and they came in, they heard our data, they heard the goals of CJCII, and they provided us qualitative feedback basically and we changed the data. We changed it for entry-level work, entry-level baseline research, and then we also from that momentum were able to go into launching our workgroups.
I’m just following a string of the story because there were so many things that kind of led into themselves but from that World Café people were buzzed, people were enthusiastic, they were receiving the initiative well, and then in January 2024 we invited some of the folks that were in attendance at the World Café and other folks that we heard about who were doing similar work into four workgroups. We launched these four workgroups in 2024 to help us reach targeted solutions for CJCII. We had about 32 members across four different workgroups which was the nonprofit systems change, for-profit system change, pathways and pipelines, and equitable and robust arts education, and then from March until 2024 our steering committee, our workgroups, and all of the things that we had heard from the World Café were slowly and surely being put into strategic recommendations and solutions so we invited people into the advocacy process by saying, hey, we just want to hear from you. We want to listen to you. We want to speak truthfully, and then we, Arts For LA, Ricky and Adam were a big part of it as well, making sure that we translated into policy and the right levers and the right language.
So that was super successful, and I paused there but basically, we just wanted to give folks the opportunity to speak authentically, move toward solutions, and then translate all of that into report-backs into—right now we had consolidated a couple of things into 13 strategic, CJCII strategic recommendation list and part of that made it into a follow-up report-back which I’m sure Ricky will love to talk about but I’ll pause there.
Courtney W. Robertson: Ricky, I can definitely invite you in if you want to add to that. I think my next question might take us a bit in a different direction because you painted a really beautiful picture about what that process looks like but we know that with all collaborative work, it’s not all perfect so would definitely like to dig into some of the nuances but, Ricky, would love to invite you in.
Ricky Abilez: Yeah, I’m happy to speak to this but I see Adam is trying to unmute too so I want him to speak first before he forgets anything he might want to share and then I’ll hop in.
Adam Fowler: No, I think what I was just going to play on the fact that, yeah, like I applaud the work is messy, right? And economic development, which is some of our lane as well, you know, the diversity is so exciting and interesting but it’s also very complicated in terms of just getting people on the freeway, the onramp, the language, the jargon, the who is thinking about what in how different ways, and I’m what Pew Research calls a geriatric millennial so I’m on the oldest of that age distribution, and our brand is kind of cynical. You know we’re a snide retweet. I think generationally there’s a little bit of kind of exhaustion around thinking about where things have let us down, whether that’s graduating into the Great Recession or here in California never owning a home probably is the way things are going. Those kinds of things are like baked into who we are, and I think what is so good about this, from my perspective and I’ll just speak in the first person is that like you have to do the work. Those small d democratic elements of communicating with your peers, hearing where people are coming from, trying to operationalize that even from a data perspective to say, OK, what your lens is correct. Here are also some additional ways people think or talk about these issues that are also true at the same time, and where do we come together. I don’t think any more we’re so isolated in our digital worlds that even like you think about your neighborhood council meeting, just these normal democratic elements. In America there’s not a ton of democratic elements in our day-to-day kind of workforce lives even. I think something like this, I just found such excitement in doing the heavy lifting of getting people into that collective, the ability to do advocacy, to speak with one voice. That work is to me often is important. That process is as important as any sort of instrumental outcome that comes from it, and so while I think sometimes it’s like a new set of shoes or hat or something people are putting on and it feels weird at first, I found it very invigorating even though I think it took a while to kind of get the legs under the collaboration.
Ricky Abilez: I think I’ll just summarize, Courtney. I think that’s what I can offer. One of the things that I admire most about our organization is that we don’t assume we have all the answers. In fact, we know we don’t, and so we consistently engage community members because we know that they do. They know how to solve the problems that they’re seeing in their communities. They know what barriers stand in their way when they’re trying to get a creative job, and what barriers they might remove to make it easier for other people who want to pursue that career. So we have engaged a community listening not only as a part of our Creative Jobs Collective Impact Initiative but every day and every year, again that’s how we create our policy and advocacy agenda. It’s all based on what we’re hearing in community and then we try to turn what we hear into policy solutions and present those to decision-making bodies who can actually implement these changes systems wide. So I think that really is the crux of what we do, and on top of all that, again we underpin it all with data because we know that that’s what’s going to really communicate the need powerfully to legislators. It’s one thing to tell a story. It’s another thing to back up the story with data.
Courtney W. Robertson: Agreed a thousand percent. But I am curious just to be more concrete. Adam, you started to uplift some of this but what have been some of those sort of pain points that you—to Adam’s point, you bringing people together across a multitude of sectors, across a multitude of experiences, etc., in this work both around advocacy but also just like the creative piece as well so I’m just curious what have been some of those top pain points or challenges and how you all are working through those. And then I have another question just more around flexibility but I’ll hold that for now.
Gabriel Gutierrez: Yeah, I mean I can speak to the coordinating part and the initial things that happened with the steering committee. Folks speak different language but everyone has agreed to the overall goals of CJCII in the beginning and part of the work for me, and I think where my background, personal background, comes up is I went through foster care. I have this understanding of social systems in a very different way where I have learned to be adaptable and kind of swivel in and out of different spaces.
In the same way, there was so much of that coordinating of language, of people’s priorities, how can we translate folks’ passion into the small timeframes that we had when we were meeting with them so really what it boiled down to was first setting up some community agreements on the practical side. We’re like how can we make sure that folks can speak the truth, hear each other’s viewpoints and then have some community agreements in place that can set up the social culture of how we have a conversation because there’s so many different ways you can have a conversation and by narrowing in on some basic elements of like, you know, we can respect each other’s points of views and expertise. We can bridge in practical experience in different ways. We can leverage practical experience from the lived experience lens, from the professional experience lens, and from folks who hold both of those identities and operate in both of those lanes, and that was a really hard thing, right?
Because for a long time I think even in the arts and culture sector, because things have been undercapitalized it’s always been a strong competition. So for us when we started to say that, oftentimes folks would first be in their usual conversation points of like I need this, my constituency needs this, and I, I, I, and then we slowly and surely said like, hey, yes, you’re an I amongst the we, how can we move forward into this.
It continues to be a recurring thing. I’ll just say that throughout the initiative but it’s something that we are strongly in support of and make sure that we’re listening to as many viewpoints and trying to find common ground as often as possible. It’s been on structural side and the coordinating side, it was not just in the steering committee groups but also in the workgroups, and folks, I think as Ricky pointed out earlier, folks know their issues. When we asking them, hey, can we work on targeted solutions, they’re like, well, what do you mean. We’re like want to know directly from you what is the dream solution, and they’re like stuttering and like what? Like I have this opportunity, and almost like this sense of power that was created between us and them and we’re like, well, no, we’re here for you. You have the power. We’re ready to bring you into this space and we’re here to just tidy it up and make it fit with the new initiative.
Courtney W. Robertson: Thank you for that. I love that you’re an I amongst the we. Probably if I had to choose a couple things to sum up collaborative work and particularly collective impact, the approach for that, would be that, right? A lot of is like my program or the things that I hold interest of contribute to this space but how do we collectively bring all these things together for the larger vision or the larger work so I appreciate you saying that. Ricky, Adam, anything you all would like to highlight specifically?
Ricky Abilez: Yeah, you asked the question and I was like, oh, we could get drinks and talk about this for years.
Courtney W. Robertson: We should definitely do that.
Ricky Abilez: Yeah, barriers. I mean there are so many. I could whittle them down to two words. I could say bureaucracy, time, limited capacity but I think for me, from my angle, grassroots organizing and policy. It’s once again reminding folks that they do have power. Folks so often forget that. To Gabriel’s point, what do you mean you want me to tell you what a solution is? I don’t know. I don’t understand policy. You don’t have to understand policy to come up with a policy solution because policy and politics are all about people. They’re words on a page to help guide the livelihoods of people to help make their lives easier. I mean really when you whittle it down, that’s what it means, and trying to get people to understand that is really difficult. Again, to participate in the civic process is difficult not only because folks don’t want to or they’re scared to but also because the way our systems are set up make it so.
I was at a council meeting the other day and I had to remind councilmembers folks who show up here aren’t just participating in the civic process because they’re bored. They’re taking time off of work, they’re paying for parking, they may be having to find a babysitter to go pick up their kid from school. I mean they are sacrificing to be here to share for one minute their concerns with you, and so it’s important that there is a mutual respect that if someone is showing up to share their concerns with you, they’re making your job easier as a legislator because you can’t make it into the community every day. You’re at a council meeting, and so to listen to that concern and then think about how we can turn it into solutions, that’s the way the democratic process is supposed to work.
On the other end of the spectrum, I think folks who do participate get frustrated because they want to see change overnight and that’s just not how democracy or politics works at all. It take a long time and that is also very difficult to get people to understand. Something we’re advocating for now might not happen until five years from now but as long as it happens, that’s the win, right? So getting people to agree to compromise, to again celebrate the wins and not just focus on the negatives, that is also extremely difficult.
I guess the last thing I would say is we’re at a time in politics in our nation and society where it’s hard to listen to each other. We’ve gone through a lot of pain, racial injustice, systemic racism. Again, I’m mentioning that the systems are built to kind of hold us back from participating. That is not easy to overcome and especially as a people of color who is queer and nonbinary, I’ve experienced it firsthand. It’s very easy to tap into the fatigue or become disillusioned. It’s so much harder to engage in conversation and hear the concerns of the other side, and then to find a middle ground.
So often—I believe this, so often the middle ground is actually what’s most progressive because it can happen faster, and because folks are scared of extremes, at least what they view to be an extreme even though it might be the best thing for us because we’re far behind, right? But I think if we can continue to find compromise and continue to have conversations with people who may not agree with us, it makes the work that much easier. Then there’s a whole data piece on where the gaps are in the data that makes it really difficult but I’ll leave it there.
Adam Fowler: Yeah, I think I would just close out with, you know, economists in my mind not generally branded as being super humble people when I think of a Larry Summers or people that are kind of the national face of the profession. We try really hard to be humble in all things we do because there’s, you know, when we think about like the policy landscape and the experiments we run as a nation or as a state or as a city, there’s just a lot we don’t know. In a dynamic economy, a dynamic global economy, there’s just lots of things that are kind of unforeseen impacts. Even if we pass the best and purest version of the thing, we all wanted, suddenly there’s some unintended weird consequence that we just wouldn’t have seen, right? It’s just kind of a rule more than the exception, and I think being humble in terms of—I loved what Ricky said about, you know, there’s no—you can go to the snootiest of snooty schools for policy but there is kind of a leveling in terms of what we actually know and what we don’t know.
Whether you went to an east coast elite school or you’re just like, hey, this intersection in my neighborhood isn’t working and I think there’s got to be a better way, I see all of those as very much equal in our system. I think just being humble is super important.
I also think, and I go back and I just will continue with the joke about being a geriatric millennial, we’ve all gotten—I think there’s a tendency to really interrogate the purity of people we want to be in collaboration or community with, and going back to the list of names and how diverse those organizations are from global multinational tech to a community-based organization doing work with a very local community, when that conversation is bubbling up directionality for policy, we’ve got to be both humble and a little—we’ve got to learn to be comfortable with the fact that these two people might be rowing the boat in the same direction for very different reasons, and from an advocacy and policy point of view, we’re just trying to get the boat moving. I’m not here to judge the logic model in each of these people’s mind because it might be very different. Maybe one is cynical, maybe one is, you know, but I think like being more comfortable, I think generationally we’ve gotten into this social media, these other things where we have these purity tests, and applied, practical, on-the-ground politics is a lot messier. You don’t have the luxury to just work with all the people you want to. You need the people that can bring all the tools, whether that’s capital, social, political or otherwise to voice some of these questions.
I think especially in the arts community, it’s so different than other industry clusters or work we do. It’s both very similar in a lot of ways and very different. I think what’s so interesting like next week if I’m going to a community and we’re going to talk about electric vehicle infrastructure, the people at the table, they’re not going to start from a scarcity mindset whereas if you’re in the arts culture creativity economy, that is the default setting and the energy is just immediately different.
Oftentimes you’re trying to do the same kind of work and so I think, you know, I just try to bring a humble nature. None of this is perfect. I’ll be the first one when you flag that like your experience on some data point isn’t the same as you’re interpreting the data point. Absolutely, right? All these things are imperfect like what is a median statistic? It means half of the observations are below that point and half are above so literally it’s not that dataset at all. The same with a simple average. Oh, average wages. Well, averages can be pulled by outliers all the time but we have to pick something, and especially federal and state policy, they want us to pick something oftentimes from datasets they use so that they can speak to themselves internally.
I think sometimes I have just reminded myself to be a little bit humble and try to think—early on somebody was talking about just the idea of imagination. I think historically there’s like a scarcity mindset that everybody’s got to throw an elbow for a limited pie and it’s historically made the dynamic different.
One of my favorite stories from the pandemic is the nonprofit, small theater ecosystem partnering with other individual venues and lobbying at the federal government level to say to the—to build out the Save Our Stages work, and those were people that had never been in conversation with each other, the local music venue and the nonprofit theater but when they put their voices together, some people in the legislature like going to see the Dave Matthews Band at their small venue. Some people like to go see the opera, and together that was enough votes to put together a really good package around both commercial arts venues and small nonprofits arts venues, and everyone was made better off.
Those have historically been one-offs and I think one of the things I love about these diverse conversations is you can see, as Ricky was talking about, the power of those kind of nontraditional collaborations sometime even though it’s hard work to get there. If it were easy, it would already be happening.
Courtney W. Robertson: Yes. All I can say is yes. Just some words that came to mind as both you and Ricky were sharing like one obviously humility in this work. Our CEO of FSG talks about like a humble learner mindset, like coming in with that and that’s what that makes me think about.
This idea around—and you all have talked about this. This has been a thread of civic engagement. We talk about that a lot in the context of collaborative work and collective impact and how much of that work are folks doing, and I think sometimes people don’t understand the connection to those two things but critically important.
Bridging, right? Ricky, you talked a lot about we might be at two extremes but how do we come to a common ground because I don’t want to be pulled all the way over here and you don’t want to be pulled all the way over there but where can we agree and move forward. I think that’s a lot of our work or should be a lot of our work. You should be inviting in folks who don’t think the same as a lot of the other folks in that space because, to your point, that breeds creativity in itself, no pun intended, but it does, right? You get to hear those different perspectives and understand what the value is for folks, right? Because if I can’t bring you along with how I think about it, let me find out what works to create that happy medium for everybody.
And then this idea around triangulation and we used to talk about this a lot when I was working in a backbone organization. There’s the what’s happening nationally around a particular issue or set of issues. What is the local data telling us, and then what is lived and living experience telling us, and all of those things hold equal weight, equal value but we often put a lot of focus on the research-backed, scientific, university-backed data when there are people who are experiencing this every day, to Gabriel’s point, of like he’s navigated different systems being a foster youth. I can’t speak to that because I’ve never navigated those systems but I could easily read on that and get a sense of what that is but his lived and living, you know, folks’ living experience adds so much more value to that data, and nuance as well so I just wanted to lift those things up from what you all have shared, and deeply appreciate the transparency around what you’ve shared as well.
I know our conversation is getting lengthy and I have so many questions. I might just follow up in an email to you all personally but I’m thinking about organizations and folks who will listen to this conversation who haven’t started this work or even folks, I would even say folks who have done it and might be like, oh, we hadn’t thought about it in this way or this is something of a pivot we could make. What would you say particularly for the folks who are like new to the policy and advocacy space or thinking about it, what would you offer as sort of like a first step for them or sort of a first set of steps for them to engage in this work from a collaborative standpoint?
Gabriel Gutierrez: I can share based on our experience. I think for us it was important to amplify transparency. I think that’s been a thread similar to what you’re talking about. Coming with the humility, humble mindset and be willing to listen to folks is really what is a key driver in the collective work. So for us, the community listening kind of was the precursor to a lot of this so for anyone starting out in a collaborative, that’s what I would highly suggest. Oftentimes you can go through the process and maybe even follow the collective impact model and approach, and you’ll find that some of the things that happen in your community listening session or, for example, in our case the World Café, will come back when it’s time for implementation. It will come back when it’s time for the hard conversations, and by continuing to be transparent with the community, we’ve been transparent with our steering committee, with our workgroups, with folks that attend our webinars which in a couple of hours we’re going to have our second webinar sharing this data, sharing the key wins, sharing the progress of the initiative and giving previews of what we’re thinking about for the next year so community I would say should be a central starting point and focus for anyone that’s beginning with the collective impact work.
Ricky Abilez: I definitely agree with all of that. I think the top way you get involved is to collaborate, and to reference that independent sector report I talked about at the beginning, they found that nonprofits who collaborate with other organizations are far more likely to advocate because it’s easier to do it as a coalition than it is to do it on your own.
To kind of build on that I would also say start small. You don’t need to go join a coalition of 80-plus organizations to advocate. Maybe collaborate with one organization and learn together. There are a lot of workshops that folks can participate in. I know Collective Impact Forum even offered on nonprofit advocacy. When you whittle it down, I’ve used that word a lot in the podcast today but when you whittle it down really, it’s as long as you don’t endorse a candidate and as long as you’re spending only a certain amount of your operating budget on lobbying, you’re probably fine. It’s a lot more nuanced and complicated than that but I think that there’s so much fear to not even try when really there aren’t that many barriers the way people think.
So participate in a workshop, learn a little bit more to understand what you actually can do as a nonprofit organization, and then as an individual, jump in. Just do the thing, get involved. It’s going to be scary until you do it. The easiest way to do it is to find a topic you’re really passionate about. If it’s the arts, great. Go on Google and type in arts local policy and see what pops up. I guarantee you there will be a city council meeting, a board of supervisors meeting. There will be a meeting in your area related to the arts at some point, and you can just show up and say how you feel about it for one minute. That’s called public comment and it is one of the best ways to start and get involved.
One click letters which we send out all the time. When you’re super passionate or frustrated about something, you go on to a website like ours and you can take action by using one button. You put in your name, your phone number, and your email and you send it. That is the best way to start because then it kind of breaks down these walls of fear, and you start to become more curious.
So then my last thing would be education. Yes, workshops, yes, professional development, but self-education I think is the most important. Really foster your curiosities, invest in them. That could be reading a book. It could be listening to a podcast. I can be watching a TED talk on YouTube. I also think that’s a really great way to inspire you to continue because again it can be really easy to become pessimistic or fall into fatigue. The way you overcome that is to inspire yourself because there won’t always be things out there inspiring you for you but you can continue to inspire yourself.
Adam Fowler: Yeah, I think from where I sit, I’m always thinking about just having kind of two sets of tools in your toolkit. I think there’s always the emotional appeal of bringing people to the table. We share a set of values. This is the world we want to see. This is kind of appealing to people’s do-gooder energy for lack of a better phrase. I think also you’ve almost immediately also got to have the kind of rational, instrumental set of tools as well in terms of here’s how we’re going to get from here to there. This is the world you want to see. These are the things that matter to you, and what’s been good about this process and I think is, you know, I’m going to take just into the world as I think about working in organizations in my own personal life is the ability to take through the logic model. Here’s why we believe what we believe. I think that is super helpful like what is the world you want to see. Well, we love arts and culture should be everywhere. Continuing to push and refine and say what does that look like? If we were aliens and we landed, what is the world—what are things we could observe if we are successful, and that leads into I think second and third phases of this kind of work where you’re thinking about performance evaluations. You’re thinking about like this is the—taking best practice to the field. Here’s what we learned. Guess what? Activating streets around arts and these other things has some other impacts on the local restaurant community or safety perceptions. I think trying to bubble that up and share that out, some of those kind of empirical things are important.
Courtney W. Robertson: I want to thank you all for sharing those and what I gather from what all of you have offered is this point around humanity, and how we show up, one, with our own experiences, biases, etc., how we’re learning and unlearning things, and then how we’re coming together as community to support community, right? And what does that look like so I appreciate those offerings of like just remembering that piece. For me I always had it like going back to the humanity. If we can all get to that, I think we can move forward in a lot of other ways so that’s what these collective reflections have reminded me of.
So as we wrap, I would love to understand and this can be very high level, I know that you all have the webinar today and we’d be happy to link that to this conversation as well once it comes out but what’s next for your creative jobs, advocacy efforts and the work that you all are doing?
Gabriel Gutierrez: Yeah, I can speak to that at a high level and because I’ve also worked some points to share with our webinar folks. Really right now what we are moving forward with into our implementation is we’re moving forward with a 250-strong coalition of supporters that includes arts workers, advocates, and partners. We also have an implementation plan that has basically expanded on our strategies from our 2023 World Café, that qualitative data feedback, and our CJCII 13 strategic recommendations which were guided by a workgroup and our steering committee members. This will guide our work in 2030 so we have that implementation tool. We’re also aiming to form an implementation body that will carry on this work as well in our implementation phase.
Other that than, we’re just aiming to continue developing research, continue having our advocacy wins, and continuing to hopefully host a future World Café to keep involving the community in the CJCII.
Courtney W. Robertson: Thank you for that, Gabriel. Anything, Adam, Ricky, you’d like to add?
Ricky Abilez: No, I would just say we gave a presentation to the LA County Board of Supervisors with policy recommendations on how they can support our initiative and also just support artists and creative workers across the county, and so the hope is that some of those recommendations will be moved forward in motions and actually get implemented by local government, and in addition to that, we will continue to include a lot of the topics we discussed today in our policy and advocacy agendas moving forward in addition to more research but that’s all I would have to add.
Courtney W. Robertson: Awesome. That’s a great segue too just for folks who might be curious or want to reach out and learn more, where can they follow you? How can they get connected to your work? What resources, things like that, where can folks find those things to connect with you?
Gabriel Gutierrez: Yeah, so for I think resources and anything related to kind of the work that we’re doing with the creative jobs collective impact initiative, you can find us online at www.artsforLA.org and then when it comes to social media platforms you can also find us at artsforLA on most social media platforms, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. We regularly post on our website different things like job boards, advocacy updates, updates on the CJCII, and other things that are happening in regard to advocating for the arts in the region.
Adam Fowler: Sure, and you can Google or enter the web address, www.cvleconomics.com. I’m adamjfowler@—what is it? X, and LinkedIn, so on most of the socials. Happy to keep the conversation going with anybody that’s interested.
Courtney W. Robertson: Awesome. Thank you. It’s always so weird to hear X. I still can’t wrap my mind around that. Anyway, I just want to thank each of you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation and I know it’s going to add a lot of value to the work that folks are doing so thank you all so much for your time, talent, expertise, and I want to thank our listeners for your continued support of the Collective Impact Forum podcast.
(Outro) And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you’re enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform, and share your favorite episodes with colleagues.
We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.
The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.
This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let’s keep working towards collective impact.
